Economist Intelligence Unit: Top 10 Threats to the Global Economy

A new assessment breaks down the biggest risks to international markets.

China’s Economy Tanks

Russia Sparks a New Cold War

Currency Volatility Leads to Debt Crisis

The European Union Cracks

‘Grexit” Breaks Up Eurozone

President Trump

Terrorism

UK Leaves the EU

Clash in the South China Sea

Oil Price Shock

Phi Beta Iota: The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has in the past earned a reputation for intelligence with integrity. This list is far removed from that reputation. A better list, published by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, offered the following ten ranked threats to humanity.

Poverty

Infectious Disease

Environmental Degradation

Inter-State Conflict

Civil War

Genocide

Other Atrocities

Proliferation

Terrorism

Transnational Crime

A truly intelligent assessment — which is to to say, one with integrity of purpose and method — would understand that the greatest threat to humanity right now is the corruption of all of its institutions, particularly banks, churches, corporations, governments, labor unions, churches, and universities. In the absence of holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering (OSEE) — none of these present in how the EIU does business — the human species is facing the sixth extinction.

The ten “threats” the EIU has chosen to highlight are pedestrian, even petulantly childish, three of them focused on a European Union that has never been more than an industrial cartel in favor of European industries unable to compete effectively on their own, and two of them focused on China in the negative without regard to the Silk Road, the energy and computing break-throughs, and other major developments emergent from the Indonesia – China axis. Terrorism has never been more than a traffic accident, it is a fraudulent fabricated threat with Saudi Arabia being the greatest threat to human balance via its export of state-sponsored terrorism in the form of Wahhabism, and Zionist Israel being the greatest regional threat in the Middle East with its calculated efforts to destabilize and Balkanize. To suggest that Russia is somehow the belligerent in either the Ukraine or Syria is to demonstrate a degree of shameless pandering to the false narrative of the West that once can only lament. Russia — and Iran — are the adults in the Middle East. Currency volatility is a function of public awareness of banking toxicity, while oil price shocks are a direct result of the collapse of 25 years of energy crimes — the willful neglect of renewable energy to include the murder of some the more successful proponents for renewable energy rapidly approaching a price point of zero.

The future is bright. The future will be determined, as Minister-Mentor Lee Kuan Yew (RIP) has observed, by demography. This means that the BRICS plus Indonesia and Iran will determine the future. Particularly influential will be the cultural and economic axis of good between Indonesia and China, and between India and Iran. Russia will rise steadily and the West — absent a restoration of honest governance in the USA perhaps led by Donald Trump – will continue its decline.

Nature bats last. The EIU is out of touch with reality and its intellectual prognostications most suspect.